Our Infinite Fates

I love you, I have loved you, and I will love you.

And so, in the absence of any abiding religious convictions, this was the one blind faith I had: that love was a physical force, and it was never wasted. Once it was called out into the universe, it would echo back to us forever.

It’s impossible to have bravery without fear. Bravery is picking up the fear and carrying it alongside you, rather than allowing it to block the path.

in the last thousand years: empires have risen and fallen and I have loved you, plagues have leaped from rat to daughter and I have loved you humanity has conquered sea and sky and I have loved you kings have been slain and forests razed and witches burned and and gold struck and maps redrawn and fortunes traded and volcanoes erupted and moons landed and cathedrals sculpted and rivers dirtied and masterpieces painted and battlefields bloodied and I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.

If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.

Because that’s the thing about humans - we leave traces of our souls everywhere, as unique and identifying as fingerprints.

If people are songs Written in the major or the minor key, Then you, my dear, are major. A climb, a crescendo, a thousand trumpets. A clashing of cymbals, joy and awe, Rousing, reaching, always to the stars. And I am but a dirge, a requiem, a lamentation, A melancholic harp in D minor, Forever wondering why you chose me.

Maybe that’s all love is, in the end. An endless tempting of fate.

I think I understood a long time ago that big joy and small joy are the same. It sounds trite, but it’s true.

Portugal. That's where I'd heard the word saudade before. It wasn't really translatable. A kind of longing, a nostalgia, a sense of incompleteness, not just romantic but existential, rooted in the very fabric of our people. (...) Portuguese was the language of melancholic dreamers, of lonely poets.

Whatever a soul was, it could be carried in a notebook.

The cruelest fate the gods and stars had ever written: the person I loved most in the world was the person who would ultimately destroy me.

slipping, slipping, and there, in a grave colder than Mars, next to a soul I'd loved for a hundred lives and lost in every one, we took our final breath beneath the indifferent stars.

Life gives us grief like mounds of wet clay, Ripe and heavy beneath our reluctant hands, And with it we can do one of three things. We can carry it with us whenever we go, Stooped beneath its awful weight, We can shove it to the back of a wardrobe, Buried beneath an old waxed coat, Or we can make something beautiful, And let it live on beyond us.

What’s your secret, Evelyn? How does the candle of hope in your chest never burn down to the wick?

Without you, there would be no poetry.

To love was to live, and to live was to die.

Ya’aburnee was a favourite. It means ‘may you bury me.’ It’s the idea that one person in a pairing longs to die before the other, because living without them would be too excruciating.

if people are songs written in the major or the minor key, then you, my dear, are major. a climb, a crescendo, a thousand trumpets, a clashing of cymbals, joy and awe, rousing, reaching, always to the stars. and I am but a dirge, a requiem, a

Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

Because that’s the thing about humans—we leave traces of our souls everywhere, as unique and identifying as fingerprints.

Though, without you, there would be no poetry. I would have only the harsh lens of my own worldview. I wouldn’t be able to see the beauty of life, because I only see it through your eyes. Muse is too simple a word for what you are to me.

The everyday tenderness of “I saw this and thought of you.

My heart is a haunted house surrounded by a moat of my own digging, kept empty of warmth so I won't miss it come winter.

Bravery is picking up the fear and carrying it alongside you, rather than allowing it to block the path

Even when there’s no big joy, even when it feels like we’ll never leave this trench alive, there’s still the small joy: a sunset, a flask of tea, your hand in mine.

a melancholic harp in D minor, forever wondering why you chose me. —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

The Evelyn I know … they love over and over and over again, even though it can only ever end in tragedy. Even though they’ve lost everyone they’ve ever loved, and they miss them in the next life, and the next, and the next. Never have they developed hard edges like I have. Never have they tried to protect themselves from that pain. They love softly, and fiercely, and openly, and it’s the bravest thing I know. The most human thing I know.

We were nothing, but we felt like everything.

And hadn’t I always known this? That to be human was to love and love and love, knowing it could only end in tragedy? Every babe in arms was born to this terrible fate, every parent and child, every spouse, every friend and lover and sibling, every uncle and aunt and great-great-grandfather, every found family, all of us bound to the perpetual cycle, all of it so awful and wonderful and inescapable. To love was to live, and to live was to die.